Revolver (2005)

 Uhhhmmmm.........O.K.?
After finishing this latest Guy Ritchie film, (who so impressed me with 'Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels' and 'Snatch') I visualized Joe Pesci saying "It's a mystery,...it's a mystery wrapped in a riddle, inside a turd! Even the film-makers don't understand, don't you get it?" It completely escapes me what this film was tyring to get across! You take your typical Guy Ritchie gangster crime/con artist scenario and breed it with some murky Jungian pseudo-psychology and this feeble mangled hybrid results? Maybe I'm not as sophisticated as the target audience here, but this film left me feeling leather restraints and a 10 milligram Haldol shot was a suitable antidote. Avoid this film like expired milk.
April 25, 2008

 UK Version not North America
I had originally seen this film in its original format (UK Version) and when it FINALLY came to North America I was very very annoyed to see it changed. Small things like difference in subtitles to missing scenes to plot changes. I just bought it but I may drop kick it and set it on fire just because. It's still a great movie and in my opinion perhaps his best (original version), although I know people will shout and scream it's far from his best. A very interesting story, shot and cut just as interesting, but why the heck they recut it is just stupid. Perhaps because it did so poorly they felt the need to change it. Whatever it may be I can't believe it took this long to get here. I suggest getting the UK version but if you can't because of region issues I recommend it anyway. But what do I know? April 22, 2008

 Going around in circles
Guy Ritchie's previous British crime thrillers have their detractors, but they also have an amiable charm and cocky intelligence that are hard to resist.

This new one, however, is not like the others.

This is a movie that's so wound up, so pumped full of macho barium, that it eventually becomes an excruciating experience.

Ritchie stretches out this time -- both in terms of plot and ambition -- and loads the movie with more style than all his previous movies combined. Wild sets and characters? Yes. Grandiosity that approaches Greenaway? Yes. Operatic in sound and scale and peppered with an occasionally cool shoot-out? Sure.

But it's all shot through with a plot so intentionally convoluted, and Luc Besson production style so brassy and arranged, that watching "Revolver" quickly becomes like flipping through the ads in Vanity Fair with a 105-degree fever. And not in a good way, either.

In his commentary, Ritchie admits he's playing with the idea of ego and the notion that enemies and competition are all simply a product of the individual's interior desires. That's a great concept on which to base a crime thriller but the movie is overloaded with too-obvious twists, faux-"Fight Club" camera tricks and a ridiculously overblown sense of drama. Some scenes that inexplicably involve animation don't help either -- they don't make sense within the story and only serve to draw more comparisons to Tarantino, who did all this first and better within "Kill Bill."

You know you're in trouble when you're watching a movie and you realize everybody in the film cares way, way more about the situations at hand than you do. In the case of "Revolver," I'm pretty sure the main characters were 210% more concerned with the goings on of the story than I was.

Meanwhile, a tangerine-tan Ray Liotta -- as, ostensibly, "the bad guy" -- spends most of the movie threatening his underlings and colorfully demanding they kill his enemies. Andre 3000 is joltingly self-conscious as a mysterious loan shark. And lead Jason Statham wanders through it all knowing his character is being played by some kind of scam, but submitting anyway. We know this because he spends the bulk of a seemingly endless voiceover reiterating what's already painfully obvious to the viewer.

The most interesting part of the film is actually the end credits. That's when Ritchie rolls out interviews with experts and pundits talking about the concept of the ego. The fiction pushed me away, but the facts (or the search for facts) actually pulled me back. April 17, 2008

 A Thinking Movie
This ia a movie in which you have to expand your mind to get the full understanding of the film. Anyone who didn't love this movie is a complete idiot. Then again, not everyone can watch a serious and mind bending movie. Sorry people not everything can be a comedy. April 14, 2008

 strange, illusive but not great
the movie provokes some great thoughts and some minor emotional traffic too - but somehow the whole movie does not stick together - we all perceive using our own judgments - which are biased - so often these perceptions are colored - so mine may be too - but I did not enjoy it completely - you can do things without showing the violence explicitly - the implicit sense of rage is difficult to portray. But that is where comes the mastery of a great director - think about movies like God father and you will understand what I am saying. Over all I will never watch it again, never watch it in a theater - for $1.40 rental its OK. April 12, 2008

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